THE REVIVAL OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
His interest in antiquity is well known. With the ardor of treasure hunters, scholars sought for classical manuscripts and antiquities, in France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and the East, and the enthusiasm excited by their success could not have been greater had they discovered El Dorado. They were generous with their treasures, door after door opening upon antiquity was thrown back, and men swarmed through them eager to become better acquainted with their idols and obtain from them information which their teachers of the Middle Ages were powerless to furnish. Some were so dazzled and docile that, instead of freeing themselves from bondage, they merely chose new masters, but, after all, more gracious ones.
Petrarch, anticipating Andrew Lang, writes letters to dead authors. Of Cicero he says: “Ignoring the space of time which separates us, I addressed him with a familiarity springing from my sympathy with his genius.” And in his letter to Livy: “I should wish (if it were permitted from on high), either that I had been born in thine age, or thou in ours; in the latter case, our age itself, and in the former, I personally should have been the better for it.” Montaigne says that he had been brought up from infancy with the dead, and that he had knowledge of the affairs of Rome “long before he had any of those of his own house; he knew the Seine.〖Cf. Montaigne’s “Institution and Education of Children” in Harvard Classics, xxxii, 29–71; and especially on his own education, pp. 65–69. See also Sainte-Beuve’s essay “Montaigne” in Harvard Classics, xxxii, 105.〗